The 50-year-old actor, who returns to the theatre in Arthur Miller's A View
from the Bridge, recalls his inspiring encounter with the playwright
eighteen years ago

Mark Strong has killed a lot of people, over the years. He has shot most of them, although there have also been stabbings, and other murders too gory to explain in detail (with a red-hot poker, for instance, when he played the charismatic Soho gangster Harry Starks in the memorable 2004 BBC drama The Long Firm). He has even drowned the same man – the actor Michael McGrady – in a restaurant fish tank, twice: first in Edinburgh in the 2006 Channel 4 drama Low Winter Sun, then again in Detroit in 2013 for the US remake.

‘Yes, I killed him on both sides of the Atlantic,’ Strong admits cheerfully. ‘The irony is, of course, how many times I have also been killed. After Harry Starks, a lot of scripts landed on my mat that were dark characters, and I found I enjoyed playing them. But unfortunately, the morality of most stories dictates that evil must be vanquished, and the bad guy has to die.

‘So I’ve died in many unmentionable, horrific ways. Which is unfortunate, because it means that my two boys can’t see the films that I’ve made.’ He reels off a list. ‘I got hanged off a bridge in Sherlock Holmes, blown off a balcony with a bazooka in Kick-Ass, got an arrow through the neck from Russell Crowe in Robin Hood. And in Stardust I was drowned, then my dead body was used to fight the hero by the evil witch Michelle Pfeiffer.’

Strong may be the smart director’s villain of choice, but he tempers this with intelligent performances in films such as Zero Dark Thirty or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and in the real world he is charming, relaxed company. It is easy to see why he has worked steadily since finishing his training at the Old Vic theatre school in 1987: he’s nice to be around, genuinely interested in other people, and has a passion for his job that is infectious. He’s also very, very good. His characters are always complex and three-dimensional, and he manages to find something we can identify with in even the darkest of villains.

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We meet at the Jerwood rehearsal space in south-east London, where he is about to start the second week of rehearsals as the tragic hero Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s classic 1955 play A View from the Bridge, which will see him returning to the stage for the first time in 12 years. The room where we talk is small and bare, with a big cardboard crate in the middle that we use as a emporary table. The play’s PR makes a joke about the glamour of the theatre as she sits us down there, but it is clear that Strong couldn’t be happier.

‘I wanted to get back into a room with a group of people – all bright, all committed – and talk about why we do this stuff, and how we do it,’ he says enthusiastically. ‘Because film doesn’t really demand that. You tend to learn your lines in isolation, you might go in and have a quick chat with the director, then you’re on camera. And you’re disconnected from the process, really. Whereas in a rehearsal room, you’re going over a text again and again – especially a text like this, which has survived for so long because it’s so good. And if our job is to shine a light on human nature, then you really get a chance over a number of weeks to do that, and then over a number of performances to show it. It’s such a privilege.’

I tell Strong that I first read the play at university, when I was barely older than Catherine, the 17-year-old niece whom Eddie has raised as a daughter and cannot let go of. I remember finding Eddie, a macho Brooklyn docker with very fixed ideas about who his niece should be and what she might become, pathetic, contemptible at the time. Reading it now, as the parent of a teenager, I find myself identifying with him far more.

Strong agrees. He is 50 now, and has two sons, Gabriel, nine, and Roman, six. ‘If I’d played him when I was younger, that’s the bit I would have found in him, the fact that he’s so immovable and drives everybody mad and is the architect of his own downfall. But as a father, I now see there’s much more going on there, to do with his genuine belief that he’s protecting Catherine. He’s obsessed with taking care of her, and he just can’t see that the best way to do that is to allow her wings.

Strong will play Eddie in A View from the Bridge opposite Luke Norris as Rodolpho. PHOTO: Simon Annand

‘His tragedy is that he’s basically doing his best, and he isn’t bright enough or in touch with his emotions enough to realise that he’s f***ing things up, instead of making them better. It’s based on Greek tragedy, so you know what’s going to happen from the beginning. And as in all great tragedies, you just watch this car crash in slow motion.’

It is not the first time Strong has performed Miller’s work; he played Biff in a 1996 National Theatre production of Death of a Salesman. Miller was chairing a conference in Salzburg at the time, and the actors went over to spend some time working with him.

‘I’ve never felt more comfortable in a man’s company than I have in Arthur Miller’s,’ he says. ‘He was a big guy. Big hands, big head, big frame. For a week he gave us a few hours of his time every day, and we’d read and talk about Death of a Salesman together. I’d just bought my first video camera, and asked if I could film a bit of it. And he said, “As long as it’s just for you.” So somewhere in my attic, I’ve got footage of him reading Willy Loman.’ Strong continues, ‘They’re very well crafted, his plays, but there was room to move in there. You didn’t have to follow his stage directions slavishly. And if you could find another way of interpreting a line, he was always very interested.’

I wonder if any of Miller’s directions are echoing with Strong now. ‘Only his presence, really, which would fit Eddie. I think he once said that if there is an autobiographical character, Eddie is not a million miles removed from him. He and Marilyn Monroe were together around this time, so the issue of an older man and a younger woman was in his mind, and also the McCarthy hearings were happening, so the whole idea of betrayal was there too. So I think he felt A View from the Bridge more than any other play involved facets of his own life.’

As Tosker, with Daniel Craig, in Our Friends in the North (1996). PHOTO: BBC

From the outside, it seems as if Strong has enjoyed the perfect career: a decade of growing acclaim in the theatre, a seamless transfer to quality TV drama in 1996 with Our Friends in the North, alongside Christopher Ecclestone, Gina McKee and Daniel Craig – who remains a close friend. Then the move into films, working on interesting projects with great people, achieving critical acclaim without the level of fame that Craig has now acquired, which makes everyday life difficult.

It wasn’t deliberate, Strong says, although it has perhaps become more so, as he has got older. He has never really strategised about his career, he just took on the work he wanted to do. ‘For me, the interesting bit was always getting on with the work and remaining below the parapet, so you can have a life. I know it’s easy to say that if you haven’t achieved stardom, won an Oscar, and made millions and millions, but it is the truth. The thing I enjoy is doing it, not red carpet or awards or any of that. And I’ve never chosen a job for the money. It wouldn’t sit comfortably with me.’

Strong’s own background is about as far from showbusiness as it is possible to get. His mother is an Austrian who came to London from Vienna at the age of 18, keen to experience the Swinging Sixties, but instead soon found herself a single parent. His Italian father left after his son was born, leaving him nothing but a name: Marco Giuseppe Salussolia. Even this went, when his mother anglicised it to Mark Strong to help him fit in at school.

She had to work in a clothing factory by day and do bar work at night to make ends meet, leaving her young son with neighbours. Understandably, she struggled to cope, and when she came home from work one night to find her five-year-old playing football in the street and swearing loudly, she decided he needed more discipline and packed him off to a state-run home in Surrey, for children from single-parent families.

‘I looked it up recently,’ he says. ‘Originally, when it was founded in the 19th century, it was called the Asylum for Fatherless Children. But it wasn’t a Dickensian experience, by any means. It was actually really good for me. It did exactly what it was designed to do, which was to make me independent and create some discipline in my life, which stopped me going off the rails.’

'I’ve never felt more comfortable in a man’s company than I have in Arthur Miller's.' PHOTO: Spencer Murphy

He attended a local primary school in Surrey then later went off to another state-run boarding school, in Norfolk. He remained close to his mother, coming home for the holidays, and often spending the longer school breaks with his grandmother in rural Austria, where he learnt to speak German fluently. ‘My gran didn’t speak English, so the only way to communicate with her was speaking German. She lived in a beautiful, idyllic rural location. You could see mountains from her window.’

Strong’s mother lives in France now, but will come over to London to see him perform at the Young Vic. ‘She loves watching my stuff. I try sometimes to look at it through her eyes – where she’s come from and what she went through – and realise it must look amazing to her that I’ve landed on my feet.’

He didn’t want to be an actor, at first. By the time he had finished school, his mother had moved to Munich to find better-paid work and he went to join her, enrolling at university there to study law.

‘It was awful,’ he laughs. ‘It’s one thing speaking fluent German, and another thing understanding the German constitution, which I hadn’t grown up with, or legalese in German. It was incredibly, fiendishly complicated. And I just wasn’t in the mood to learn that. What I was in love with was the idea of being a lawyer – the briefcase, the BMW, the raincoat, the standing up in court proving somebody’s innocence. Which essentially was sort of acting.’

After a year, he decided to come back to London, and began reading college prospectuses with the idea of doing a German degree. ‘Leafing through one of them, on the way to G for German, I hit D for drama. And saw a picture of a guy in a dinner suit and a girl in a big white dress, and it said, “Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I loved English at school, and realised I would enjoy studying plays. I got in to Royal Holloway. They had a little studio theatre where we put on plays, and that’s what I realised I wanted to do. So from there I went to the Old Vic theatre school to learn how to do it properly.’

He met his wife, Liza Marshall, then a producer at the BBC, at a casting, and their careers seem to have run comfortably in tandem, with Marshall becoming head of drama at Channel 4, before going on to head the European division of Scott Free, the production company run by Ridley and Tony Scott (until his death in 2012). They have learnt a lot from each other, Strong says, and even when they’re working on the same project, they don’t get in each other’s way.

‘She is completely uninterested in all of the stuff that I need as an actor to get this character up and running and working on screen. All that concern about the look of the guy, how you’re going to behave. Because as a producer, you’ve just got to get on with making the thing. And I’m not really interested in the rushes, and whether the line producer has managed to arrange a crane for next Wednesday. So actually, our jobs are totally separate. I can be in something that she’s producing, and we don’t tread on each other’s toes at all.’

Daniel Craig is godfather to their elder child. The internet entrepreneur and new baroness Martha Lane Fox – an old university mate of Marshall’s – is godmother to their younger one. ‘She’s an incredible role model,’ he says.

Last year he spent five months in Detroit filming a US adaptation of Low Winter Sun, a drama centred on two homicide detectives who murder a fellow policeman. It failed to find its audience, he says, being a little slow and dark for mainstream American tastes. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it, I thought it was a great series, but I heaved a sigh of relief when it wasn’t picked up [for a second series]. Because I could have ended up being there for the next five years, for five months of every year, and

I had this horrific realisation I would miss all of that time with my boys growing up. It’s important to me that I don’t spend too much time away from the family. I try to pick jobs that will keep me as close to home as possible, or if I have to go far away, for as little time as possible.’

He is an avid Arsenal fan, and has a season ticket along with his friends Rupert Graves and Patrick Marber. ‘If one of us can't make it, we give the ticket to the others to give to a mate. Patrick tends to benefit the most because he’s a writer and he’s around more than we are. Rupert’s often off doing Sherlock in Cardiff, and I’ve missed a lot of games this season.’

With Nicole Kidman in the thriller Before I Go To Sleep, due for release in September. PHOTO: Rex Features

It’s easy to see why. He has four films upcoming: an indie film, Ad Inexplorata, about a one-man mission to Mars, for which he spent an intense month filming in upstate New York just before starting rehearsals for the play. There’s an adaptation of SJ Watson’s bestselling thriller Before I Go to Sleep, starring Nicole Kidman as an amnesiac who wakes up each morning with her memory wiped clean. Strong plays the doctor who tries to help her recover her life.

Then there is The Imitation Game, a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Enigma Code during the Second World War. ‘I play Stuart Menzies, head of MI6. It’s very cleverly written in two time frames, and Harvey Weinstein has just bought it in Berlin for something crazy like $7 million. So I think that will get noticed, and it might be rather a good film.’

There is also The Secret Service with Matthew Vaughn, who directed him in Kick-Ass and Stardust. ‘It’s essentially a spoof James Bond movie – there’s lots of action in it, and fun to be had.’

And as Strong points out, he doesn’t play the villain in any of them. ‘I’m going to try to play some good guys for a while, and just see how that is,’ he says, laughing. ‘It’s hard to enjoy them as much as the bad guys, and the clothes are nowhere near as good. Good guys don’t wear nice suits!’